Hey Mom! I'm home from my extended GETAWAY trip - spent the week going to yarn stores and a dyeshop; then the 23rd and 24rth at Maryland Renaissance festival. Drove home monday and collapsed yesterday.

All these Years, hiding his real identity. Now, he fakes his own death so that he can live in obscurity in an obscure town in North Carolina for some obscure reason (actually, he's in the Obscure Witness Protection Program [OWPP, pronounced "OW Pee-Pee"] but using his real name). His motives for this are obscure, but he may have joined a right-wing political cult involving Yog-Sothoth.

Hugh probably has children named Nug and Yeb but doesn't know it... ahhh... knew it.

RIP Hugh and thanks for all the orgasms. Ahhhh, I mean, great articles... like the in depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Gary Gilmore and hundreds of others. Hugh moved the consciousness of a generation (or three+) of many selling tits and ass and intelligence and compassion. What a business model! Pun definitely intended.

I am pleased to report that I ain't dead yet, unlike the Heff. When he was alive I harbored an ambition to wlk into the Chicago Mansion and demand the checkbook, but that dream has been OBE. Lo, how the mighty have fallen!

Of course you ain't dead yet! You've just killed off the Hugh Heffner persona so you can get back to your roots in the Cult of Yog-Sothoth, patron of North Carolina! Heff would never do that, so he had to go, and as Amos you "find" the millions and millions you put in various places around the state.

A day without Internet isn't like a day without sunshine - because when you have no Internet you might as well go outside and enjoy the sunshine. I dug more sweet potatoes today. MOM, we need marshmallows. It's time for pumpkin pie spices in the sweet potatoes. Mmmmm!

Again, I must make amends for absence, but it is so time consuming being alive and well. Actually, I have been intermittently unwell in minor ways, and will certainly post requests for sympathy should anything serious develop. Sympathy is SO useful and healing, isn't it? But today's a good day and I send my spriteliest vibrations out to all those ever touched by Mom's gracious halo of influence.

Rapparree, all is forgiven. Go ye home, start anew!

As for sailing, I can only beg to differ with your uninformed, uncharitable, uneducated, mean-spirited and curmudgeonly remarks.

In elementary school, I was told that the Vikings had a very hard time recruiting willing settlers for colonies in Iceland because the place's name, "Iceland", gave the impression that it might be a bit uninviting.

So, when a later bunch of Vikings discovered another large island that was just as cold, desolate, and uninviting as Iceland, they named it "Greenland". Settlers signed up by the droves.

The same principle has been followed by Florida land developers for decades. Would you rather live in "Holly By the Sea" or "Holly a Few Miles Inland From the Sea"? Guess which is the more accurate description of the place?

I stand, or rather sit, corrected, Amos. I believe now that you have indeed crawled the ratlines up to the foretop rear mizzen sprit.

No, Bee-Dub, I didn't bring any ice home. You see, the glaciers are flat dab-smack on to of volcanoes! I tried, but I nearly burned my little pinkies off and then I couldn't play the liar Amos had made for me. (I thought it was spelled "lyre" but he said it was "liar.")

And Amos is not alone in suffering minor medical mishaps. December 4 I will have surgery (again!) for both cubital and carpal tunnel syndromes. Fortunately, it's my left hand so I'll still be able to swing a swath with my sword.

Rapp, maybe this will be hard for you to hear--you are famous for the hardness of your hearing. But as a friend I have to tell you: using Google Translate to say things in foreign tongues does NOT make you seem exotic, alluring, mysterious, worldly OR wise. There is another set of adjectives that DO come into play for such behaviors but I forebear (out of kindness, I suppose).

Actually, Amos, I have excellent hearing aids AND bluetooth accessories courtesy of the Veterans Administration. I also have an iPhone now, and an iPod Touch, and I'm thinking of an iPad (just a little one). But if I go to an iPad what do I do with the Acer and Asus little computers I have? The Asus even comes apart to I can use part of it as a tablet.

Google translate gets to be fun when you take one bit of text, translate it through several other languages, then back to English to see what comes back. We've conducted that game in the past, but since the software has gone through revisions, we ought to give it another test.

That paragraph, above, "translated" below. I didn't write them down as I selected the language to translate to, and I think I broke Google Translate. It stopped working a couple of times till I switched browsers.

This is supposed to be the same thing, back in English: Google iberzetsung will appear after clicking on the text, iberzetsn is in etlekhe andere shprakhn, a demolition geyn tsurik tsu English tsu zen vos kumendik tsurik. to accelerate the cube, which is visible in channels that are located at a distance from the sea.

Facebook translates the late Chonga Chimp's "Ook ook!" as "Tsk tsk." But lately, I don't know where or how, I have lost all my mirth and everything seems nothing except barren earth, a miasma of foul odors.

Chonga who was Chongo has never lived down his/her shame at the way he/she treated his/her mother and his/her sister Chinga. So it is no surprise he or she is subject to episodes of acute depression. If only s/he could face up to his or her regrets and guilts, he/she could be made whole again. But nooooo.

Looks like Tropical Storm Nate is drenching BWL about now. MOM predicted this, said Ma Nature wasn't going to quit until she clobbered all mudcatters living around the rim of the Gulf this summer. It took four tries, but I believe many of us have gotten wet now. AND as a bonus, Nate might push some extra rain up over the top of Gnu's house if it travels as projected.

Nate was a near non-event for us. Two or three inches of rain. Lots of dead limbs down but no trees. I removed the fabric from the portable garage we keep my wife's car under and moved the car to a treeless area. Sure enough, a big limb that could have punched through the fabric and damaged the car was resting inside the garage frame this morning. We need a bit of wind every now and then to clean the dead stuff out of the trees.

Acme you have revealed the exact same problem extraterrestrials have with translating Earth languages. Naval intelligence still has problems letting ET translators know what they have been doing wrong. The movie Arrival shows the difficulty in translating temporal differences in language. You have shown the difficulty in multilingual translation between two planetary languages. I bet 'they' did better in the days of old Latin. Or did they give us that?

oh my amos' gutters are running with water whatever shall he do i hope he survives this cataclysmic preview of maritme Armageddon oh my i just saw on the news that he could have gotten as much as 0.001 inches of rain i have notified the red cross and fema and the salvation army and all about this disaster all of mom's kids should collect old clothes and old food and stuff and send it all to amos

Oh, Amos, I wouldst fain to see thee lashed by cash or muddled by mere money! Here, here is some good advice which I give thee for nothing, and stash these few precepts in thy memory!

Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel, but do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; for the apparel oft proclaims the man, and they in France of the best rank and station are of a most select and generous chief in that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

FB is up again. Good thing I checked. I wanted to delete a post from, and ban a member of, a group before his comments became a content problem with FB. One bad apple can spoil the group. Now, back to membership requests.